It took less than four minutes for the second patrol vehicle to arrive, lights off until the last hundred yards, then flooding the gate in white light. Mara was out of her own vehicle by then, moving on foot the way she had planned, camera still recording in one hand, voice raised and official.
"Sheriff's department! Step away from the gate! Hands where I can see them!"
The man with the bolt cutters froze, the tool still in his hands, and then let it drop to the gravel with a clatter that seemed very loud in the mountain night. The other man raised his hands at once, palms out, and said, "Wait โ wait, we're HOA patrol, we're authorized โ"
"You are not authorized to cut a lock on private property," Mara said. She was close enough now to see their faces in the headlights. The younger one, the one with the cutters, was Tom Pryce, the measuring-wheel man from the first night's video. She knew his face from the stills. The other man was not Ray Deluca. She looked for Deluca and did not find him, and she filed that fact away even as she kept her voice level and her eyes on Pryce's hands.
Cole arrived a minute later, and the rest of the arrest was orderly, the way arrests go when nobody runs and nobody reaches for anything. Pryce was handcuffed, read his rights, and placed in the back of a patrol vehicle. The bolt cutters were bagged. The gate was photographed, lock and hasp and keypad, and the keypad log was preserved before anyone touched it again. The second man, whose name was not Deluca and whose connection to Summit Security & Patrol was thinner โ a fill-in, he said, called that afternoon โ was detained, questioned at the scene, and released pending further investigation.
Mara stood at the gate after the vehicles had gone, in the sudden quiet that follows sirens and headlights, and she looked at the lock. It was scarred, gouged where the cutters had bitten, but it had held. The gate had held. She thought about Ethan Walker asleep up the road in his cabin, Duke beside his bed, and about the fact that he had not come down, had not shouted, had not brought the shotgun. He had trusted the system he and Cole had built, and the system had worked.
She called Ethan herself, because Cole had asked her to, and because she thought he deserved to hear it from the deputy who had been there.
"Mr. Walker," she said, when he answered on the second ring, wide awake in a way that told her he had not really been asleep at all. "It's Deputy Ellison. They came back. They tried the old code. It failed. Then they tried to cut the lock. We have one man in custody. Your gate held."
There was a pause on the line, and Mara heard, faintly, a dog shifting on a floor.
"Thank you, Deputy," Ethan said. "Is anyone hurt?"
"No, sir," Mara said. "No one is hurt."
"Good," Ethan said. "That's good."
Chapter 25
Ethan did not go down to the gate until morning. Cole had told him not to, and Mara had told him the gate had held, and there was nothing he could do in the dark that daylight and a camera would not do better. He slept in fits after the call, and woke before dawn, and made coffee, and sat with Duke until the sky lightened enough to walk.
The lock was scarred when he saw it. He ran his thumb lightly over the gouge in the hasp and felt the rough edge where the cutters had bitten and slipped. It was property damage, plain and simple, and it made him angrier, in a quiet way, than the first intrusion had. The first intrusion had been stealthy, almost polite in its strangeness โ men who measured and photographed and closed the gate behind them. This had been blunt. Someone had stood at his gate in the middle of the night and tried to force it.
Cole met him at the gate with a paper cup of coffee and a look Ethan recognized from their years of crossing jurisdictions: a sheriff who had an arrest he was glad to have and a case he knew was about to get bigger.
"Pryce," Cole said. "Tom Pryce. Same man with the measuring wheel the first night. Attempted criminal trespass, criminal mischief for the lock. He's in custody in Hamilton. He's not talking much yet, except to say Linda authorized the patrol."
"And the other man?" Ethan asked.
"Not Deluca," Cole said. "That's the interesting part. Deluca wasn't there last night. Pryce had a fill-in with him, a man Summit Security called in that afternoon. Deluca was supposed to be on the crew. He wasn't."
Ethan thought about that. Ray Deluca, the older man, the camera man, the ex-surveyor's assistant who kept the photos. On the first night he had photographed the cabin, the barn, the woodshed, the gate. He had been the one to say, on the pasture camera's faint audio, "Linda wants the full approach documented." He had done the job he was hired to do. And then, on the second night, when the job turned from measuring to cutting, he had not shown up.
"First crack," Cole said, as if he had read Ethan's mind. "That's what I'm calling it. Pryce is loyal, or scared, or both. Deluca โ I don't know yet. But a man who doesn't show up for the second night is a man who is thinking about the first one."